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POV

POV: Amazon Launches New App for Sellers

Background:
Amazon recently launched Marketplace, an app store made for professional third-party sellers to further enable them to continue to sell products smoothly. Marketplace, which launched Monday, May 21st, 2018, features seller-centric software and tools from developers to handle everything from pricing, inventory, advertising and much more.

Details and Implications:
The launch is a part of the company’s larger push to work more closely with developers of seller tools. As it’s a toolkit designed for Amazon sellers, it will not be visible to Amazon’s customers, only its 3rd party sellers. The new app store, will be available in North America initially, but we can expect it to be available in other markets in due course.

While this app store will be in the background from a consumer perspective, it could provide a way for sellers to enhance their inventory on the platform. In addition, it could provide a major boost to the scale of over 2 million small and medium sized businesses within Amazon.

Marketplace will contain software apps related to inventory management, business operation, advertising, and a variety of other tools that can help sellers foster more business. This will be the first time that Amazon has endorsed third-party developer applications intended for professional sellers. For software developers, Amazon said the app store is in beta and currently by invitation only, although they can request an invitation on the Amazon Services web page.

Jeff Bezo’s once stated “we see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.”

This rollout is not just intended to boost third party business with sales and attract more merchants, but to also improve the overall experience that customers have with third-party sellers within the Amazon platform.

"Many developers have innovated and created applications that complement our tools and integrate with our service," Amazon told CNET. "We created the Marketplace Appstore to help businesses more easily discover these applications, streamline their business operations, and ultimately create a better experience for our customers."

We should consider the possible affect this could have on our clients whose products have been sold via third-party sellers; as this could have a positive impact on sales and improve overall consumer satisfaction.

Amazon is not the only marketplace to launch a suite of tools for its sellers, as eBay recently enhanced its seller support, last Autumn eBay rolled out AI based image recognition features to help facilitate image-based searches.

Summary:
Online marketplaces have been growing rapidly over the last couple of years and are expected to continue to increase. These third-party sellers are attracted to companies who provide turn-key solutions for their businesses; and those that provide the most visibility and ongoing enhancements.

The Amazon Marketplace Appstore will enable these small and medium sized companies to grow their overall business and guarantee that Amazon has an influence over the entire consumer experience within Amazon – regardless of the seller.